“Good grief,” Michael said. “I’d forgotten about the watchman.”
They sheltered in a doorway out of sight of the hut.
“I could try to talk my way in,” Charlie said.
Yes, he could. But watchmen tended to be stubborn and suspicious. It was, after all, what they were paid for.
“Wait,” Andrea said. “You can do that if there’s no other way.” He felt in his pocket. “Rosina, cara, you have the telefonino?”
She raised an eyebrow but said nothing as she handed an iPhone to him.
“What are you going to do?” Michael said.
What indeed? As the English said: In for a penny, in for a pound!
“None of you wants to know what I am going to do,” he said, “and I’ll be back in two minutes. I hope.”
Cecilia watched Papa walk away from them, back the way they had come, and disappear into the lighted building.
“Do you know what he’s going to do?” Michael said.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” she said. And she hadn’t.
Several chilly minutes passed while she stood with the others, watching for Papa and at the same time keeping a wary eye on the watchman’s hut. Then, to her surprise, the door to the hut opened and the watchman left. Mackintosh collar turned up
Siding Star 361 against the driving rain, he walked by without noticing them and continued on towards the main building.
Another minute or so passed and Papa reappeared.
“He’s gone!” Cecilia said when he got within earshot.
“I know.” Papa grinned and handed the iPhone back to Rosina. “Wonderful things, telephones. See the cable—they’ve even put one in the watchman’s hut. Fortunately they also have a highly efficient switchboard: puts you straight through with- out wasting any time on questions. Very sensible.”
Cecilia got it.
“Papa—you didn’t!” This was a side of him she hadn’t seen for years.
“I see there’s no watchman in that hut,” he said, “so obviously they don’t mind people looking round. Shall we go?”
They splashed over to the entrance, then followed a path inside the fence that went to the right. They had to make their way alongside the mound, and the going was not easy. The ground sloped sharply towards the barbed wire and was no doubt slippery at best. Soaked, it was a nightmare. The rain was now falling in sheets, which made it hard even to see.
“My God,” Rosina muttered to herself, “maybe I should have taken Andrea’s advice and stayed at home.” But she clung stubbornly to her flashlight with one hand and her husband with the other, and together they blundered on.
Suddenly the entrance to the mound was there. They plunged into cloaking shadow. It was good, for a moment, simply to be out of the din and the drenching—but only for a moment. Rosina shuddered.
The smell! That horrible smell!
She and Andrea looked at each other. It was the same, the same as the night of the assault. Neither of them would ever forget it. They tightened their clasp on each other’s hands.
***
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ChristoPher BryAn Cecilia noticed their reaction.
“It’s the same, isn’t it? The smell?” They both nodded. “I
knew it,” she said. “Along here. It seems to go along here. Oh,
God! It’s revolting!”
She switched on her flashlight and led the way. Behind her
the others lit their own torches.
The passage turned left, then very slightly upwards, then
right again, and down steep steps for ten feet or so. At the
bottom they found themselves in what appeared to be a plain
square chamber that could have held a hundred people. Good stonework.
Gravel floor.
They shone their lights up, down, right and left. There were
no other exits. There was nothing at all to remark on save that
smell. And, somewhere, the slow drip of water on stone. It was,
after all that had led up to it, anticlimactic.
“Well,” Michael said, “we’re here.”
But somehow Cecilia felt that they weren’t there, even though
she didn’t know where there was supposed to be.
“I don’t think this is it,” she said. “There’s nothing here.” “What do you think?” Michael turned to Charlie. “I agree with Cecilia. This isn’t it. There’s nothing here.” She thought she heard Papa swear softly to himself—and
then he called out.
“Here—what’s this! I think I’ve found something.” It was a square of stone that looked slightly different from
the others, but nobody would have noticed it if they hadn’t
been looking for it. Papa touched it. It seemed to Cecilia that it
moved, just slightly. Their eyes met.
Was this the place?
He pressed again. Nothing happened. Perhaps she was
wrong. Perhaps there had been no movement. He slid his hand
to the right and pressed again.
Nothing.
He pressed in another place. This time the wall groaned, and
siding stAr 363 a section of it began to swing back. It moved until it stood at a forty-five degree angle to its original position.
Opened beside it was a dark, narrow entrance.
Cecilia shook her head.
“We might have missed something,” the constable had said.
Evidently, he was right.
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“W
ait!” Cecilia said, as they started to move towards the entrance. “We don’t want any accidents. Can you give me a hand?” With the help of the others she manhandled a piece of stone until it was so placed that the entrance couldn’t close on them.
She took from the pocket of her jeans a box of matches, struck one, and held it into the tunnel. It burned strongly, flickering slightly as in a draft.
So far, so good.
She lit another and walked a few yards in. It too burned with the same slight flicker.
“All right. Let’s try it.”
Within seconds it seemed to her that they had passed a barrier. The walls on each side looked and felt immeasurably older than those they had left. Instead of large, well-squared blocks, there were small, slender bricks.
Papa looked at her, and smiled.
“Romani,” he said, with a certain pride.
“Sì,” she said, and smiled back.
At one point there was a stone slab set in the wall. It bore
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Christopher Bryan an inscription, badly worn. As she shone her torch onto it she could make out two words and part of a third.
DIVVS MITHRAS VEN …
“‘Divine Mithras comes—or came’,” Papa said.
“We know there was one temple of Mithras in London,” Michael said. “Why not another? This would be the sort of place they’d choose, wouldn’t it?”
Papa nodded, then shone his torch beyond her and picked up a second slab, again much worn. Most of it was beyond deciphering, but one line stood out:
ET NOS SERVASTI ETERNALI SANGUINE FVSO
“‘And you have saved us by shedding eternal blood,’” he translated.
“But surely that’s Christian?” Charlie asked.
Michael and Papa both shook their heads.
“I think it refers to Mithras slaying the bull.” Michael looked at Papa, who nodded. “But still, let’s allow the writers to have said better than they knew.”
“Look!” Papa pointed to the wall further along, where the bright beam of his flashlight revealed a painting. It looked ancient, and not all of it was clear—indeed, a major part of it looked to have been vandalized. Splinters of stone lay on the ground near to it, and deep incisions had been cut, it seemed, into the wall itself.
Cecilia looked at her father. He walked forward, knelt by the picture, and stared at it.
“What this once showed,”
he said at last, “was what the inscriptions say: divine Mithras, the light-bringer, killing the bull. But look at what someone has done to it! And done recently, I think.”
Cecilia nodded. The stone shards, even the patterns in the dust, were evidently new. The destruction of such an antiquity had been vicious, wanton, and stupid.
“This is terrible,” she said.
“It’s worse than that, bella. It’s a statement. I think that who
Siding Star 367 ever did this understood the painting very well.” He sighed, shook his head, then went on. “For Mithras’ worshippers, so far as we can tell (for they left no written records) his victory represented the triumph of order and creation over chaos. It expressed their hope—as you said, Michael—for something better than they knew. But now look! It is Mithras who has been eliminated! Viciously eliminated—see the deep slashes! Even his knife has been hacked out. What is left is the bull. So what was an image of hope has been changed into an image of despair. What it now says is that there is no creation, no order, only chaos.”
The others stood for a moment in silence, surveying the ruined painting. Papa got slowly to his feet.
Suddenly Charlie spoke.
“I think this means we’re right. And we’re near. I think we must go.”
The others followed him.
The way was narrow, curving to the left, and slightly downwards.
And now with each step Cecilia had a sense of moving backward in time, decade by decade into the past.
Without warning the stench, to which she had begun to grow accustomed, trebled in strength. She stopped, nauseated. Shaking her head, she tried to turn away, to find some other air to breathe. There was none. Michael, just behind her, had also stopped and was leaning against the wall. They stumbled against each other. Overcome, unable to move forward or back, they clung together and leaned against the rough stone. Still, his arm around her felt warm and reassuring and she was grateful for it.
Then came the scream—an ear-splitting emanation from the darkness that pierced brain and heart and pulled them inexorably forward. Cecilia found herself being dragged, as if wrenched by a gale. Hair, hands, and body—she felt as if she were disintegrating.
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ChristoPher BryAn She lost Michael. She seemed even to lose herself. After a while she again felt gravel beneath her feet, but still she could see nothing. Not “see nothing” in the normal sense of that phrase—but literally nothing. Absolutely nothing. She put her hand to her eyes and moved it inches away and it made no difference. This was blackness so deep it seemed to deny even the possibility of light. Was she blind? She drew breath to cry out, and choked. Yet her choking made no sound. She tried to shout and felt her lips move, but as in a dream there was no sound.
She was sure Michael was near but she couldn’t find him.
Suddenly she saw—something! A gleam of white. She strained her eyes, desperate for the relief of vision. The gleam turned to silver and into her view came the last thing on earth she might have expected.
A wolf. A she-wolf.
The wolf was silver—seeming, indeed, to gleam from within with a pale, cool light. Around her, total blackness. Yet the wolf seemed unafraid. Where there was neither dimension nor solidarity, the wolf gave her own. In the instant of seeing her, Cecilia again felt Michael’s arm around her shoulders. She pressed against him and received a reassuring squeeze in return. But still she could not see him or the others, so she watched the wolf. She had no idea of the wolf’s size, for there was no way to relate her to anything. There was only an impression of joyful, animal strength, an ardent power.
The wolf jumped, as if to a higher level, sat, as if on a flat sur- face, and looked about. In one way she seemed familiar. And yet Cecilia had certainly never seen such a creature before. To look on her was like listening to a certain kind of music. She remembered once hearing Gluck’s Di questa cetra in seno, and Mama whispering to Papa, “Quella è una finestra in Paradiso.” Well, looking at the she-wolf was like that—a window into paradise. She was a creature from Eden.
siding stAr 369 With a jerk of attention, like a dog called by a well-loved human, the wolf turned, seemed to jump down, and trotted to a place on their left. There she stooped and bent her head. In the faint glow Cecilia could now see the face and form of Charlie Brown, who seemed to be asleep. The wolf was licking his face. Charlie blinked and shook his head, touched the wolf, and said something Cecilia couldn’t hear.
Then, slowly, he got to his feet.
Whether there was now light around them, or there had been light all the time and her eyes had not adjusted to it, or, indeed, she saw at all, Cecilia could never be sure. But by some means she was now able to distinguish the others as well as Charlie— who stood, tall and still, his hand on the head of the wolf, and faced the darkness.
As the menace seemed to recede, Michael dropped his arm from her shoulders but stayed nearby. Cecilia moved closer to him but he didn’t react, his gaze still fixed on the darkness beyond Charlie. Mama and Papa, who were just beyond him, were staring in the same direction.
Out of the darkness, a voice. Or, rather, the denial of voice.
“How dare you come to disturb us?”
The wolf growled. The darkness seemed, as she watched, to grow—pulsating, summoning, claiming. But then Charlie spoke, and in his voice she heard a grief that seemed older than the foundation of the world.
“This is not your place. You should not be here.”
The pulsating darkness wavered. For a long second there was a pause —then the pulsation renewed, and the blackness grew: an infinite void.
“I bring your doom.”
Like a drumbeat the last syllable came upon them, and the darkness lapped around them.
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F
or some time now, Charlie had known. With Andrea’s discovery of the door he had felt again the fear in his dream: the consciousness of something dark and looming, something that waited.
Then came the scream. Lost and blinded, he fell, and might have lain forever had the wolf not roused him and led him forward into the darkness.
And now he began to understand.
Beyond the rage and the danger he saw something else. He saw loneliness.
Perhaps he saw it because he had been lonely himself. The creature was lonely.
Whatever its history—a billion years of negation?—the
reward of that history was to be alone.
Without hope.
And now, Charlie saw himself.
Infinitely lower in the scale of creation than the fallen angel
that he faced, yet possessed of a capacity at that moment powerful.
Compassion.
He could feel compassion: that searing movement by which
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Christopher Bryan the Eternal had been bound to a decaying creation at Bethlehem and on Calvary.
What, then? Charlie Brown—the fingertip of divine glory?
Ridiculous.
No, actually it wasn’t.
But what if he refused?
Had God no other means?
Infinite means, of course.
Another Bethlehem.
A deeper Calvary.
Have I not many words for many worlds?
But all that was at this moment irrelevant. The question that mattered now was what was he going to do?
Of course he was free.
He could say No.
He could abandon the fallen creature.
He could withdraw.
Back behind Michael and the others.
Back to the beginning of the tunnel.
Back to the streets of London.
The underground.
The airport.
New York.
And Natalie. He could go back to Natalie. Who was his dream, his delight. All that was needed was one decisive act. An act of which he was, in one sense, perfectly capable: he must abandon the creature.
He could not.<
br />
Why had Natalie gone to Charleston to be with her mother? Why had she helped the woman with the child in Sussex Gardens? Simply because she was Natalie—true to a quality in herself that was the best part of her. And if he abandoned the creature and went to her now, his going and his union with her would be founded on a betrayal of that quality. And what was it that he had just quoted to the others? What would you do
Siding Star 373 if you knew you were to die today? Why, you’d do what you were going to do anyway.
He must choose the creature.
As he formed that thought, he groaned.
The warm, strong body of the wolf pressed against his thigh.
For a moment he trembled.
Then he grew still, looked at the thing before him, and called it.
He called it as he might have called a well-loved but disobedient dog.
“Come!”
From the depths of a rejection older than time, the creature had known itself approached. Something disturbed it. Something challenged its hitherto impenetrable denial. For a moment its fixed attention to its own perception of ancient wrong wavered. No human word or experience could comprehend what was threatened, for no human word or experience could comprehend its lostness. The creature reared to destroy—but then some not-quite-severed shred of a billion-year-old circuit flick- ered. Rejection sought, as ever, to support rejection by feeding upon rejection—and reaching, found not enough.
So balked, the creature hesitated. It had been created for angelic charity— sheer intellectual charity. And now a remote survival of that intelligence glimmered, raising the momentary possibility of attention to something other than its own injustice—the possibility, and the infinitely incalculable risk.
Before it stood the biped, disgusting combination of spirituality and matter. Yet from the biped—something. Its mouth moved. It uttered a word. In themselves all words were to be rejected, for all words, however fatuous or malicious, held by their nature some echo of that original Word to which, even now, the creature must concede the very being it willed to deny. Yet fatuity or malice—the denial of intelligence or the
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ChristoPher BryAn denial of charity—could, even through words, have offered the creature the peculiar strength that it sought. Instead there was something else—something affording no handle that could be grasped, no rage or rejection that could be absorbed. Even more dangerous, through the word there came, though faintly, the echo of a call first heard at the dawn of creation. Certainly this was merely the remotest foster-child of that. Yet still, there was something. For an instant, the strain ran true.
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